Recalibrate your Perspective: The Premises and Psychological Egoism

While it’s true that I don’t even kind of believe in a basic goodness of humanity, I don’t consider myself cynical.

That sounded awful—utterly depressive and any definition of vain.

Let’s establish the premises:

1) The foundation of human interaction is selfishness.

2) I can only ever see things through my two eyes.

On selfishness:

To begin, humans are animals. We are creatures of the animal kingdom down to our most basic instincts, namely survival. This drive to survive naturally starts at the individual and works its way out (stories of heroic sacrificing are special because of how unnatural or extraordinary the incidents are). We feed us and ours then move on to benefiting the community directly around us, formed for mutual security, which simultaneously improves our chance of survival. (I hope you enjoyed the summary of Hobbes’ social contract theory.)

From this initial formation of societies we have obviously progressed quite far.

We began the slow process of peaking Maslow’s hierarchy some time ago, seeking a god on our side.

(Some suggest this pursuit of a personal deity is on its way out for something presumably more transcendent, which will probably result in the deification of the self. This will lead to a societal devolution, from community to isolation, thereby starting the regression back to the state of nature in a functionally infinite cycle of progress and regress.)

Note that this holds that relationships are a product of psychological egoism. We trade friendship for friendship, the meeting of a psychological need, based on what pleases us. We are friends with people we find attractive, funny and interesting. Finding these positive characteristics in friends has fundamentally nothing to do with any benefit to them, and we’re not closest to those for whom we could be the most beneficial (if so, even that gives us a sense of importance and heroism or something—nothing is safe from selfish motivation). Mutual bettering, that iron-sharpens-iron business, is incidental to the formation of communities. It is a product of our ascending the old pyramid of decreasingly important things [read Maslow’s hierarchy of needs], a self-centered journey.

So, goodness needs to be redefined to leave room for psychological egoism: the quixotic, untainted ‘goodness’ of idealists does not exist save for wishful thinking.

Goodness exists.
It’s just not as Good.

None of this is negative, I should say.

It seems to me that it’s just the way it is.

And what’s more, it’s subconscious (insomuch as we aren’t aware of the most basic aspect of our motivations, not in the quasi-possession by a second self that we’re not aware of and that sometimes controls our minds, cf. Freud).

I’ll get to the perspectival context later.